Linus Pauling left school without a diploma and won two unshared Nobels
Linus Pauling walked out of high school at 15 without a diploma because the principal wouldn't let him double up on history classes. He went on to explain how atoms bond, won the 1954 chemistry Nobel and the 1962 Peace Prize, and remains the only person with two Nobel Prizes neither shared with anyone.
Pauling was born in Portland, Oregon, on February 28, 1901. His father, a druggist who moved the family around the state, died of a perforated ulcer in 1910, leaving his mother to raise three children. A friend's chemistry set hooked him; he later wrote of being entranced by reactions that turn one substance into something utterly different. As a teenager he scavenged equipment from an abandoned steel plant and, with a friend, tried to sell cheap butterfat testing to dairies, who would not trust two boys.
Short of two American history courses, he left school without graduating and was admitted to Oregon Agricultural College, now Oregon State, in 1917, against his mother's wishes. To pay his way he worked as a machinist's apprentice, and the college soon hired him to teach the analysis course he had just completed. While teaching chemistry to home economics students he met Ava Helen Miller, later his wife and a human rights activist. His high school awarded him an honorary diploma 45 years after he left.
After a chemical engineering degree in 1922 he went to Caltech, using X-ray diffraction to work out crystal structures, and earned a doctorate in 1925. A Guggenheim fellowship took him to Sommerfeld, Bohr and Schrödinger, and he resolved to apply the new quantum mechanics to chemical bonds. The results included orbital hybridisation and, in 1932, the first reliable scale of electronegativity, a way of predicting how atoms share electrons. His 1939 book The Nature of the Chemical Bond became the field's standard text. He also revealed how proteins fold into coils called alpha helices and flat beta sheets, work that fed into the discovery of DNA's structure.
In later life he campaigned for nuclear disarmament, earning the Peace Prize, and promoted very large doses of vitamins, especially vitamin C; those medical ideas never won acceptance among mainstream scientists. He published over 1,200 papers and books and died on August 19, 1994.
Source: Linus Pauling
